One of the first things I bought with my own money as a kid was an internal 100 MB Iomega Zip drive with an ATAPI interface. I remember asking my computer teacher Mr Jones where he’d got his, and he wrote me a referral that got me a bit of a discount, which was great. I used that drive for everything for years, amassing a small tower of the grey disks and their jewel cases. I envied the MO disks my Japanese friends had, but I couldn’t fault my Zip drive. A couple of decades later I took ...

The pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, winner of the 1972 A.M. Turing Award and inventor of one of the most iconic algorithms in all of computing, was nothing if not opinionated. Certain programming languages drew his ire, for example: He once dubbed Fortran “the infantile disorder” and stated that “the use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a… Source The pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, winner of the 1972 A.M. Turing A...

Natural light bathed the Royal Mile on the warm, summer’s morning. The Fringe is close to being finished, but there are still a few days of shows left. I was standing amid a city wakening up: where, hours later, there would be music and singing and crowds. I gave my day to serendipity. Having no plans for the day, I let my feet take me where they wanted to go. I had a coffee and, because of the warm sunlight beaming through the window, left the cafe early and decided to go for a long walk to s...

By Emma Yanyang Kong , Aditya Deshpande , Asad Abbasi , Bowei Yan , David Fagnan , Ashish Rastogi , Dhaval Patel , Ray Zhang Introduction The Netflix experience is a journey of discovery. Every visual cue, from the artwork on a title to the video previews that autoplay while you browse, is there to connect you with a story you will love. We call these visual cues assets , and choosing the right one for each member is a personalization problem of its own. But which image or video previe...

This is what rainy days were made for. 🌧️🐶 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . This is what rainy days were made for. 🌧️🐶 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you....

In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”. That may have been true in the seventies, but it’s not true today: selling out requires both technical skill and a careful sense of how large organizations work in practice . One of the goals of this blog is to teach people how to do it. If you want to live with uncompromised integrity, you don’t need anyone to tell you how: simply always do exactly and only what you want to do. You will be repeatedly punished for...

speedlify.dev , now running Speedlify2 . The year is 2020. Inspired by a lack of budget for a web performance monitoring tool, the original Speedlify project (Speedlify Classic) was shipped to continuously measure site performance. It ran Lighthouse against a predetermined list of sites and ranked their performance against each other. Over time, I started to add a few more things to Speedlify. A Web Component was added to show scores on your web site. The Eleventy Leaderboards...

There's a scene in Apollo 13 where Jim Lovell, played by Tom Hanks, asks Houston control to check his calculations, which they do using a slide rule.  My father told me that when he was in college (1950s) that engineers measured their technical prowess in how many digits of accuracy they could get off a slide rule. The actual Apollo 13 incident took place in 1970. A year later Bowmar/Ali released the 901B, nicknamed the Bowmar Brain, for about $240.  The following year came the HP-35, the fi...

Monitor features usually aren’t a priority for many online casino players. They focus on the games, bonuses, and payment speed. But with a nice screen, the whole experience changes, and the games can feel like more than they do on a small display. Screen Size Changes What Players Can See Online casinos can have a lot on the screen. Account details, menus, offers, bonuses, and sometimes some ads. On a small screen, everything can feel crowded. Players may need to scroll or open menus ...

This post continues to elaborate on Virtual Consensus and the new Loglet abstractions of the AtomicLog and LogDrive . My last post focused on composability, this post looks at log sealing. A common aspect of segmented logs is that when extending the log with a new segment, the current active segment needs to be sealed to prevent further appends. This post discusses segment sealing in the AtomicLog and LogDrive abstractions. I’m going to treat Virtual Consensus here less as a fixed API and m...

0.0 Context setting Thursday, 27 August 2026 in Portland, Oregon. I started this on Tuesday and then now suddenly it’s Thursday? That’s no fun. Separately, I’ve also started noticing a bit of burnout or a bit of pressure? I enjoy writing, but I also don’t want this to become some sort of horrific pressure. Which is why I’m trying very hard for it to not be a big deal that I had a gap of a couple days. Also! This is episode 26 of season 21 , which is a lot of episodes. The prev...

Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline their processes, save money, and juice margins. But AI's capabilities are founded on the data that AI accesses, and for many organizations that foundation is little more than sand. Pramod Sadalage and Prem Chandrasekaran write about how to build a reliable foundation of data that can be accurate and trusted. more… Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline ...

The other day, I found myself wondering how big 52! (52 factorial) is, and that led me to ponder how these could be estimated without a calculator or a computer. It turns out there’s some fairly interesting math behind being able to estimate the size (number of digits) of a factorial reasonably accurately. This post will start by stating how to do the estimate, and if you’re curious you can read on for the math background. Without further ado, the approximation is: \[\text{number of di...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-41992 for the project GNU gzip , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix decompressing two files in the same invocation of gzip (that's possible???) an attacker can trigger out of bound reads in the LZH decoder, causing reads past the end of the shared global buffer that is somehow not reset between invocations. This is due to the affected components being ...

This one-day workshop introduces a few ideas that someone with a background in computer science (or tech more generally) needs to know in order to think clearly about the harms of social media and AI, and about how they should be regulated. I would be very grateful for feedback; in particular, I know I’m trying to cram far too much into one day, and many of my references are probably out of date. At a glance Length: one day (roughly eight hours, including breaks and lunch) Audience: pe...

Any rigorous thinking about the long-term future leads to extreme outcomes. It cannot, by construction, produce normal or mundane futures. “Rigorous thinking” means you have a model: a formalism for representing the state of the world, and a transition function to advance the state. You put the world into the formalism, and turn the crank to get successive states of the world. Models can be qualitative or quantitative. Most thinking about the future is qualitative and informal: people thi...

I'm traveling to Chicago for VCF Midwest next month. I'll be demoing NTP time history on vintage Macs, with my own GPS-derived NTP service hosted on an Xserve G5, synced via NTP or a strange AppleTalk timing extension from the 1990s . So I built a little 'portable homelab' (pictured above) that supports 1-10 Gbps networking, can run off a small battery for at least an hour, switches between multiple WANs (so I can get my own 5G Internet connection, in case I need it), and gives me 12 w...

I’ve been helping SF companies get sales and one of my customers came to me with a cold message that he wasn’t getting any good results with it. A competitor tool generated it. Can you find out what’s wrong here? If you said “everything”, you’re right. There’s so much wrong with this message and I feel bad that he’d been using it for months. as part of the 1:1 onboarding on my GTM product, I’ve been helping my customers fix their sequence and messages so they get the m...

I've been moving my home storage over to a UniFi UNAS Pro 8 as part of a larger homelab moderization . My main IRONHEART (the ultimate PC from a few years back) desktop now has an Intel E610-XT2 10GbE card, the NAS is on 10GbE, and there's a Minisforum MS-01 miniPC on the same network with a 10GbE SFP+ connection running Immich and Portainer and a few other things. Everything says 10 gigabit. Windows says 10 gigabit. UniFi says 10 gigabit. SMB copies are using the correct NIC but my file copi...

If you’re a fan of the web, you probably want to know that voting is now open for that lovely initiative that is the Tiny Awards , running for the 4th consecutive year. I got asked to be a judge this time around, and my votes helped shape the shortlist of candidate that is currently up on the site and I was pleased to see that two of the five sites I picked are part of the final group. Picking five from the list of submissions was a lot of fun. There were so many interesting websites su...

I have not written here in a while, and the reason for that is that is blog was created mostly with writing about computers in mind. And for quite some time I have been tired of computers. One of the reasons for that is because my computer job is sucking out a lot of my energy, and the second is that I am now more into, let's call it, analogue stuff, gardening, house, biking, reading books, staying away from the screens. I don't want to touch or think about IT too much. Also I created a new ...

Linux 7.2 has been released! That was fast. Let’s dive in to yet another Asahi Linux progress report. We’ve got a lot of interesting developments for you today, so make yourself a cuppa and enjoy. Think Different… again The Apple Silicon platform’s power management infrastructure is complicated. Responsibilities are divided between multiple hardware blocks, including the SMC, PMGR, and PMP, all of which have featured before on this blog. While supporting these blocks is important for pow...

I frequently see statements about differences between strongly ordered architectures (like x86 or SPARC) and weakly ordered architectures (like ARM or RISC-V), with the confident assertion that weakly ordered machines are inherently much more scalable than strongly ordered ones. The key misconception is the implicit assumption that CPUs of all stripes actually obey their memory model for every memory access. They, emphatically, do not. They promise to behave as if they did. Ther...